Roberto Mancini: I'd rather Manchester City players womanise than drink

Roberto Mancini says post-match drinking is 'part of the English culture'; a part he tries to discourage. Photograph: Tom Jenkins

For the average English football star in 2010, sexual liaisons have caused nothing but trouble. Wayne Rooney's encounters with a prostitute have ruined his form and might still end his marriage. John Terry lost the England captaincy after allegations he had an affair with the ex of an England team mate. Peter Crouch was also publicly humiliated after betraying his pregnant fiancée in a one-night stand in Madrid.

In the lead-up to today's match between City and Blackpool, the Italian revealed that he cannot believe the level of drinking by English players and tells them to concentrate on women instead.

"I do not understand players drinking until they are drunk. We do not have that culture in Italy. We would prefer to go off with a woman," he said. "That's what I liked to do after a match, and I tell my players now it is better that they go with a woman than drink."

Mancini first arrived in the Premier League almost a decade ago to play for Leicester. Returning to manage City after guiding Inter Milan to three successive Serie A titles in Italy, he said that the post-match pint still bewilders him. "I know it is part of the English culture to drink after a game. When I first went to Leicester we went straight to the pub after training and drank I don't know how many beers," Mancini said after being asked about Manchester City's goalkeeper Joe Hart's recent drinking binge in a Spanish bar. "When you are young you feel you can do what you like, and maybe in your early twenties you can recover easily," he said. "But when you are 28 or 29 you begin to pay the price." In England, as Rooney and others could tell him, ill-advised sex can stall a career far sooner than that.